Persuasion

When you meet a character in Tamriel, they will have a certain disposition towards you between 0 and 100. A 0 means they absolutely hate you while a 100 means they consider you completely trustworthy. The disposition between people varies with how they feel about your prior actions, race, and reputation. The Persuasion Mini-Game will allow you to gain people's trust through either bribes or persuasion. Once each round you can select either Admire, Boast, Joke, or Coerce. Certain choices will be either well received or result in lowering your disposition. You can find out whether the choice will be well met or not by looking at the person's face as you highlight the option.

Each round, the four quadrants will be filled with wedges. The larger the wedge is, the greater the end result will be. The person will either hate, dislike, like, or love the action. Quickly find the action that they love and the one that they hate based on how they change their face. To succeed, you need to remember that all four wedges must eventually be selected per round, even the ones that you know that they hate. You can't select an option twice and each time you do choose an action, the wedges will rotate. You can follow the large wedge all the way around as it rotates, but you'll end up hurting your cause as you choose the largest wedge on the thing they hate. The trick is to plan ahead. If you know that the action they hate will be occupied by the smallest wedge on the third turn, select the largest wedges on the actions that they like for the first two turns. If you end up with a net positive reaction, the disposition will go up.

Disposition goes down if you don't quickly select an option, so don't spend too much time looking for the perfect combination (nobody likes a slow talker). Once you have maxed out the increase in disposition from persuasion, break out your bribes if their disposition isn't high enough for you yet.

It is quite easy to raise your skill in Speechcraft just by playing this little mini-game all over town. It isn't super useful to have this as a Major Skill, so you probably won't gain levels by practicing, but you will end up with huge multipliers on your Personality attribute when you do level up.

Aside from stealing and finding items, you can also purchase them from merchants around Tamriel. The prices that you'll get quoted will depend upon the merchant's disposition towards you. This means that persuasion can work to get you cheaper goods. The other thing that the price depends upon is your Mercantile skill. The higher this is, the lower you can slide your offered price. Press the price a little bit lower than the base price each time you buy something to increase your Mercantile skill. Eventually, you'll be able to get offers well below asking price accepted when you try to purchase goods.